In recognition of his representative position and eminent public services.
"I have constantly, all through the years behind us in South Africa, striven for a spirit of co-operation, of sympathy, and of union between all races in that country to which I have the honour to belong. Union was inevitable in South Africa, but it has been my desire and my striving for many years that it should be such a union as that between England and Scotland.
Fifteen years ago I was fighting against the British Empire. There has been no change in me. The cause I fought for fifteen years ago is the cause for which I am fighting today. You in this country are a large-hearted people, and I am sure you will forgive me if I express my view that fifteen years ago, eighteen years ago, you were wrong. For a brief moment in your long national history you went off the track, and you came to grips with a very small people; and in that struggle I did my best in order to conserve the self-existence and the liberty of my people. I am sometimes proud to think that, according to the old apostolic injunction, we heaped coals of fire upon your heads, and were the instrument of bringing you back to the right track, to your old traditions of liberty, to the old ideal of standing by small peoples and to that consciousness of right which guided you in the past and will guide you in the future.
As the result of the policy adopted after the Boer War we see today a nation that fought against the British Empire with a vigour and a persistence seldom seen in the history of the world - which has been, and still is, fighting with all its strength for the common cause. This has been brought about, and can only have been brought about, by the spirit of liberty, which has been the guiding principle of British history. We see clearly that it is only on a basis of freedom and the completest autonomy that the British Empire will continue to exist and will become stronger in the future. The British Empire is not a state; it is half a world. It comprises old nations as well as young nations, and all the vast 4 congeries of states can only be kept together in the future on the basis of liberty. I am sure that when the final settlement comes to be made of the constitutional arrangements of the British Empire, that will be found to be the only solution. The spirit of comradeship, which is the only basis of union, is there, and on that basis I am sure we shall find the solution of our constitutional relations in the future."